Tools for Registries

The usefulness and reliability of information provided by cancer registries (CRs) depends on the quality of the data collected. Therefore, in 2014, the ENCR, in cooperation with the JRC, has set up a Working Group with the task of establishing a comprehensive and standardised list of data quality checks to be adopted by European CRs and European projects. The Working Group has produced a proposal for 'One common procedure for data quality checks for European cancer registries' (2014). The proposal included agreements on case definition, variables to be collected, and their format and internal consistency rules. Following this proposal, the Call for Data submission guidelines were published in 2015.
The JRC has developed a software to enable CRs to perform data quality checks independently, testing their data against the requirements of the 2015 ENCR-JRC Call for Data. The JRC-ENCR Quality Check Software (QCS) represents a first step in the process of providing CRs with a user friendly data-checking, and quality control tool. The aim is to standardise the procedures to be followed by European CRs when submitting data in order to improve their quality and comparability.

The latest version of the JRC-ENCR QCS was launched on 24 November 2016 and includes:

checks on the files format (for incidence, mortality, lifetables and population files) and on variables - names and order according to the Call for Data submission guidelines;